The Pheasants Next Door

A couple of million hunters go after pheasants each season, and the best pheasant cover most places is either swarming with those hunters or private land posted off-limits to the public. If you aren’t fortunate enough to hold a standing invitation to hunt the family farm in pheasant country, you may have to join the crowd on public land or perhaps pay to play on someone else’s private land. There is, however, another option. Let me introduce you to the pheasants next door. I met them a decade ago while checking out a new PLOTS public access area.

- Garhart Stephenson

The birds were thick—but so were the rigs parked along the road. Orange hats and bird dogs swept the golden field like a broom. So down the road I rolled, hoping that one of the other areas on the map might be a little less crowded, a somewhat reasonable hope since several lay some distance from the nearest pavement.

I finally found an empty tract. It didn’t look all that promising, certainly not for pheasant. But it did look like it might hold a stray Hungarian partridge or sharptail grouse. If nothing else, it would be better than watching other people hunt.

It was an enjoyable little jaunt. I didn’t bump any partridge or grouse, but I greatly appreciated the lone rooster in the game bag. Then I was back in the truck, returning to that first area, hoping some of the crowd had dispersed.

As I was driving along, a pair of roosters crossed in front of the windshield, and I watched them glide into a tall but sparse patch of prairie grass. Not the kind of cover where I had ever had much luck before, but I thought, “Better strike while the iron is hot.”

Yellow PLOTS signs along the road confirmed that I could, indeed, simply pull over and hunt. So I did, and what I found astounded me.

After parking the old Ranchero I let little Katie out, and soon we were marching together into thin if shoulder-high grass. I didn’t see anything, but the dog’s behavior indicated there was more here than met the eye. I had to hustle to keep up with her. The way Katie was twisting and turning meant she was hot on the tail of a sprinting bird in full evasion mode.

“How lucky can I get?” I thought to myself. “The little darling actually has locked onto one of those two birds.”